


Sharp Teeth

by Kirstein_and_Arlert



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Undercover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-26
Updated: 2014-09-26
Packaged: 2018-02-18 20:48:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2361719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirstein_and_Arlert/pseuds/Kirstein_and_Arlert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>*Spoilers for the character description and first image of Bobbi Morse*</p><p>Director Fury calls her to his office on the Monday, and the news that Bobbi Morse was a traitor breaks by the Friday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sharp Teeth

Director Fury calls Bobbi to his office on a Monday. She’s fresh off an undercover job, her hair still dyed red, and the smell of gunpowder still clinging to her. Five enemy agents dead, one SHIELD agent lost; not a bad result.

All she wants is a shower and a nap, maybe a quick sparring session with Natasha, but apparently she can’t even get that. She leaves her field suit in the locker room, padding up to his office in protective footwear, leggings, and a t-shirt that’s seen better days.

If Fury’s bothered by the clothes, he doesn’t say anything. He simply motions for her to sit down in the seat in front of his desk. Bobbi fleetingly wonders if she fucked up that op, and now she’s going to be handed a cyanide tablet. Or whatever Fury does when a SHIELD agent really fucks up. Surprisingly, it doesn’t happen that often.

“Agent Morse.” Fury opens a file so that she can see the contents. Photographs of agents she doesn’t recognise, and some she does – Handlin and Green, two agents who have no reason to ever meet. Bobbi looks up and Fury’s almost smiling. “You see it, too.”

“What is this?”

Fury simply pushes the file over for her to read. Bobbi reads it as quickly as she can. Agents who have no reason to meet have been sighted together, mysterious flaws are appearing in key operations, information is being hidden or erased without Fury’s approval. It all adds up to…

“Corruption.”

“Exactly. There’s something very wrong in SHIELD, and I need someone to find out what it is.”

Her. He means her.

“What’s my objective?”

“You’ll be set up as a traitor, suspected to be passing information to our enemies. We’ll burn you from SHIELD’s records, erase any evidence that you were ever here, and some agents will be sent after you, if enough don’t go after you on their own. If one of our powerful enemies wants to recruit you, you’re to accept their offer and try to place yourself in a tactical position within their organisation.”

“And pass information to you?” Sounds easy enough.

“No. You’re to commit minor acts of sabotage, loopholes that you’d look for while you worked for SHIELD, feed them false information. You don’t contact me under any circumstances. This isn’t a solo mission, Morse. This is the biggest deep cover mission that it’s possible for an agent to be assigned to. For all intents and purposes, you’ll be out in the cold, possibly for years, until the organisation makes its move, and we will pull you out after exploiting the flaws that you’ll have created.”

“Why me?” she asks. Natasha would be better. Natasha, who is already suspected by so many people, simply because she is who she is. Bobbi… Bobbi’s nobody. She’s an undercover agent who’s worked on a lot of operations. She’s great at her job, but she’s not the kind of person who gets personal assignments from Director Fury. And that’s fine with her.

“Because you’re the Mockingbird. Your field record is exemplary, your test results have never dropped below 95%, and your friendships with other agents will help to maintain the illusion that you planned to betray them.”

 _I can be anyone_ was what she had said after her third undercover job. She’s not quite regretting it now, but she’s sure that she will soon.

It doesn’t feel like it’s Bobbi saying the words when she says, “Okay. I’m in. What do I have to do?”

“All you have to do is leave.”

She thinks that’s that. She’s already mentally packing, thinking of the things that she’ll need to clear out of her apartment and squirrel away if she’s going to do this.

“Agent Morse,” he says as she reaches the door. “Be careful. Be covert. If anyone thinks for a second that you’re not really on their side, they will kill you.”

 _Including SHIELD_ is left unsaid, but Bobbi’s been a spy for years, worked around them for years before that; she knows the code. She thinks he almost sounds sorry that she’s going to do this.

 

 

The news breaks on the Thursday, hours before her apartment is blown up. Bobbi’s already out of town, but she watches the chaos on the news.

No one calls. She expected that from Clint, whose reaction to any sort of betrayal is to pretend that you don’t exist for a few weeks. But Natasha…

She thinks that, on some level, she’s pissed that none of the friends she’s made during her years working for SHIELD even doubt the accusations, but she’s too busy to care. She’s already gone.

“It’s like peeling away layers, or putting them back on when I need them,” was how Natasha had once described her way of working.

Bobbi’s way of working is pretty different. She strips everything back, puts away any trace of her real self, and puts on someone else’s life.

She isn’t Bobbi Morse, codename Mockingbird, loyal SHIELD agent, former SHIELD scientist, and orchestrator of the Great Halloween Prank, which saw agents from Level Seven and up being told off like badly behaved children.

She’s Bobbi Morse, who was gathering information with the intent to betray SHIELD, who created Mockingbird as a front for her real goal, and has recently been exposed as a traitor. Her loyalty is for sale to the highest bidder, and she doesn’t care what anyone does with her information, or what her job is as long as she gets paid. She has never dated any assassins who could be called legends.

She thinks of the way that Natasha laughed when she was part of a real prank for the first time in her life, of the way that Clint likes to stretch out on the couch instead of sleeping out in bed, as she watches the dark hair dye stain the shower.

 

 

Natasha is the first to try to kill her. Of course she is. They’ve been friends for years, became friends when almost every single person was waiting for Natasha to turn around and cut someone’s throat, and they have been so much more than friends. Of course she’s the one who’s going to hate Bobbi the most for her manufactured betrayal. Of course Fury would send her.

“Never took you for a traitor,” is what makes Bobbi snap. Not the blow that dislocated her shoulder, not the wound to her leg that will have her limping for a week. The confirmation that Natasha really believes that Bobbi would betray SHIELD, that she’d betray her friends, that Natasha came here of her own accord and not because Fury sent her.

Bobbi says, “That’s a shame – I took you for an idiot right from the start,” and if she uses a bit more force than necessary to knock Natasha unconscious, it’s not because she’s pissed off that her friend thinks that she would sell her out, it’s just part of her cover.

Just part of the mask.

 

 

AIM comes to her first. The man who talks to her claims that he works for the Mandarin, but Bobbi’s been a spy for long enough to spot the lie a mile away, even if every single one of his guards seems to buy it.

The woman, though, a scientist Bobbi recognises from a conference she went to before she joined SHIELD, she’s something else. She’s genuine. She really does want to help people.

“No thanks,” Bobbi says, addressing Maya Hansen, because she can tell how pissed off the man claiming to be working for the Mandarin is getting whenever she ignores him. “I’ve already got a buyer for my information.”

Hansen nods. “Of course. What about your skills – its _Doctor_ Morse, isn’t it? I’m working on a very interesting project right now that I think you’d enjoy.”

“Sorry, my skill aren’t for sale.”

Advanced Idea Mechanics might be a threat, but they aren’t the kind of threat that Bobbi’s looking for. She’s looking for a bigger fish in a bigger pond, not little fish in a think tank.

 

 

The big fish find her, and she’s more than a little surprised about the species.

HYDRA. HYDRA is still around. HYDRA, an organisation that everyone believes to have been wiped out a long time ago. It’s horrifying, it’s _brilliant_. Of course Fury wouldn’t have suspected HYDRA. No one would expect HYDRA to still exist, let alone be infiltrating SHIELD.

“It’s not a question of what my information can do for you, but what you can do for me in return. I have years of operations, the locations of secret bases, the names and identities of operatives that even the best of SHIELD’s enemies are completely unaware of.” She leans back, cool and calm, hiding the storm in her chest, the pit where her stomach used to be. “I’m not giving that up for just anything.”

These men and women, these HYDRA people, they’re just waiting to rip her throat out. She can feel it in the way they look at her, the way they’ve send the chief of security and his entire team there. There are SHIELD agents on that team, people who are supposed to be dead.

Natasha used to tell her stories from her childhood. Stories about woods filled with wolves, and girls walking through them alone, but with a twist; the wolves weren’t the only ones with sharp teeth.

This man, the one dead at her feet, the former head of HYDRA’s security, thought he was the wolf, that he was the only predator here until her knife ripped open his throat. This is what the people she fights always seem to forget; metal isn’t the only way to kill someone.

“Wolves and girls,” Bobbi repeats Natasha’s words as she nudges the dead man off the pier with the toe of her boot. “Both have sharp teeth.”

The chief of security’s second in command flinches.

Bobbi smiles and imagines there is blood on her teeth. “So, about that offer...”

 

 

The wolves aren’t the only ones with sharp teeth.

And she can feel hers growing sharper every day. She kills HYDRA operatives from the moment she joins HYDRA. Not personally, of course, but through providing slightly wrong information. Security codes that are off by one number, paths that lead right to deadly traps, orders that lead them right into an ambush she expects and they don’t.

Everyone writes it off as an accident, unfortunate timing, and sometimes they do kill people working for SHIELD, the people who have been on Fury’s records as double agents for months or years. Acceptable losses.

She’s the chief of HYDRA’s security within a year.

 

 

Bobbi takes to wearing red. It contrasts nicely with her darker hair, catches the eye of enough HYDRA operatives that she gets a reputation for drawing everyone’s attention with ease.

When she was with SHIELD, her colour was blue, her hair was blonde, and she thinks she killed less people. She thinks that less people tried to kill her.

There is a photo somewhere, when she was blonde and her colour was blue, and maybe it’s ash now, or maybe it was hidden away with any surviving belongings by Fury, but she remembers that she had one arm around Clint and one around Natasha.

She misses them. She doesn’t contact them.

 

 

Something happens in New York. People whisper about aliens and make plans to try and steal some of the alien weapons that SHIELD’s acquired. Bobbi sabotages them, of course, but she watches recording of the battle on the news.

“What are you thinking?” one of her men asks. One of the braver ones.

“That I want his blood,” she replies, not looking away from Captain America on the screen. She doesn’t tell him that she’s been wanting a sample of his blood for years, and that she doesn’t want it as a member of HYDRA, or even as a member of SHIELD, but as a scientist whose mentor has devoted her entire career to super soldier serum.

 _Oh, Doctor Calvin_ , she thinks as she sees a brief shot of Natasha and Clint fighting, _If you could see me now_.

 

 

There is one time when HYDRA gets too close. Not to her, but to Clint, who’s been off ever since whatever happened in New York.

There’s a sniper. There’s a perfect shot. There’s something in her chest that feels like fear and horror, because Clint is right there, Clint is an easy target, and HYDRA will take out a major threat in a few seconds.

Bobbi shoots one of her own men in the back and pulls the pin out of grenade he’s carrying.

She doesn’t stick around to see what happens next.

The official story is that she was never there.

 

 

The man who trained her in hand to hand combat and weaponry, he used to laugh and say, “You’re a great lie girl.”

Bobbi thinks she gets it now.

 

 

She finds the moles. Garrett, she’s almost expecting. He’s always given her the creeps. Sitwell, is more surprising, but now his unusual lack of ambition within SHIELD makes more sense. There are others – Rumlow and other people she trained with, Sanders who used to always hang around the labs.

One of them, a sleazy scientist who always hit on her when she was working on Project: Gladiator, works it out. Threatens to tell the leader of the HYDRA cell she’s working for.

“Why do people always do that?” she asks, annoyed. “You find out some big secret, and your first response is to tell the person you’re going to expose! How could you be so stupid?”

She shoots him, and is surprised by how easy it is.

 

 

There’s a girl who hasn’t been conscious for years. One of the operatives calls her ‘darling’ and Bobbi has a hard time not breaking her cover when she discovers that he’s more than just a creep, he’s the girl’s father. She’s eighteen, and she’s spent the last six years of her life in stasis.

She breaks the rules. She breaks the stasis. She breaks a man’s neck to keep him silent.

The girl, who manages to stutter that her name is Jess, can’t stop crying as Bobbi smuggles her out of the country. She understands that her dad is a criminal, and she understands that he wanted to keep her unconscious, and she understands why Bobbi has killed people, but she still doesn’t get it, not really.

“Listen to me, I need you to find a man in Marseille. His name is Clint Barton, Ask him to call his friend Tasha and, if he asks you why, tell him that there’s a hen among the foxes and, when you see Tasha, tell her that girls have sharp teeth as well.”

Jess wipes her eyes on her sleeve. “Why?”

“Because I’m not who or what anyone thinks I am.”

She leaves her at the station with detailed directions written in a scrawl that she hopes Clint and Natasha will recognise, if they somehow miss the other references.

Bobbi’s never been the praying type, and she’s not about to start, but she hopes that the girl survives.

 

 

Things fall apart. Or, rather, just fall.

SHIELD falls. Half of HYDRA falls. Cut off one head, and another will take its place.

Bobbi hopes that HYDRA isn’t the only organisation that is true for.

 

 

Her details never appear in the leaked records. No one comes to pull her out.

HYDRA operatives say that Fury disappeared after SHIELD fell, that Hill is working with Stark, that the Black Widow hasn’t been seen since she appeared in front of the senate, that Hawkeye hasn’t been seen since days before SHIELD fell.

Bobbi stays. She sabotages a few attacks on SHIELD bases, selling out a few members of her own team as double agents.

 

 

There are always cowards.

“He tried to turn against us now that everything’s out there. He was working for SHIELD, passing them information!”

The man on his knees used to be a SHIELD agent, used to be a HYDRA operative. Not he’s just begging for his life.

“Please, I’ll do anything. I’ll stay with HYDRA. I’ll work for free. Just don’t kill me. Please.”

He looked up when Bobbi walks forward, and she sees it in his eyes. He knows who she is. Maybe he already suspects that she’s still secretly working for an organisation that no longer exists.

“Please,” he whispers.

She shoots him and doesn’t flinch.

 

 

There are whispers, from the kind of people that not even HYDRA wants to work with, that SHIELD is still out there. It’s small now, led by a man who is supposed to be dead, and a team that no longer exists. The information it sketchy, but she hears stories about the Black Widow pulling agents out of HYDRA buildings, Hawkeye reappearing just in time to save an innocent man from being assassinated.

There are sightings of a girl, in her late teens or early twenties, occasionally appearing with Hawkeye or Black Widow.

For the first time in a few years, Bobbi smiles, and it’s genuine.

 

 

This is what Bobbi knows: SHIELD is gone, or almost gone, Fury is gone, there is no one coming for her, and no one knows who she really is, or what she’s really been doing while working for HYDRA for years.

If she leaves, she is dead. If she stays, she can still help people.

Bobbi stays.  



End file.
